Dharma Bum

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower
                        plucked from a river of lava
and held aloft on a tightrope
                        strung between two scrawny trees
above a canyon
                        in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don't drop it, Don't drop it, Don't drop it - ,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it
everywhere, for years,
while right behind you,
the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes
                                            of a crazy song.
- Tony Hoagland
from How It Adds Up
What Narcissism Means to Me

Art Space

This made my day today..

I went to a lecture the other night at SCiARC about exhibition design by Peter Noever.. i thought there would be a little more meat to his lecture because i like some of his ideas about showing art outside of traditional exhibition spaces.. that some art can not be contained by a museum space.. Some of my favorite shows that i have done have been in non traditional spaces.. probably my most successful show was at The Office an art space run by Chris Hoff. Which was an art space set up in a series of empty offices.. low ceilings... I think in non traditional spaces the art work can have more of the feel of the artist's studio... many traditional spaces tend to make the artwork feel like it is in a showroom and gives it this added on context/reading of being a luxury item which my work isnt about at all. i think painting in particular can really suffer from the fetishism of the showroom space. - Mark Dutcher

Link Dump - God & The Art of Listening

For a nation of talkers and self-confessors, we are terrible when it comes to talking about God. The discourse has been co-opted by the True Believers, on one hand, and Angry Atheists on the other. What about the rest of us? - Eric Weiner

Wanted to point DB readers to a couple of opinion pieces in the NY Times I found interesting today. Earlier this week I was having lunch with my Australian friend Ellie and she shared an interesting perspective about how we in America have mixed politics and religion in a way that wasn't recognizable to her or her experience of her home country. In the article Americans: Undecided About God? Eric Weiner points to this link as one of the reasons many americans are opting out of both religion and politics. The solution? He thinks someone needs to invent a new way of being religious, a sort of entrepreneurial answer that would provide space for doubt, encourage experimentation, and allow some of us an opportunity to talk about God without embarrassment. It's worth a look HERE.

Next up we go to Africa again to learn The Art of Listening. Henning Mankell looks to Africa to re-learn the art of listening and describes how many people make the mistake of confusing information with knowledge. Take a look HERE.

image: Esther Pearl Watson

$$$

The class struggle still exists; it exists more intensely. - Michel Foucault

These days there's nothing more common than money. -- Yet sometimes it seems that the very ubiquity of money robs economics of any intrinsic interest as a topic for cultural discussion: there's more and there's less, what else is there to say? -- I think the main reason that most people, most humanities academics especially, don't want to talk about economics is not because it's a political hot potato, because it's so controversial, but precisely because of this commonality or banality. The very all encompassing presence of money seems to solicit just as predictable modes of response: celebration, denunciation, or some hand-wringing combination of the two. - Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault

Michael White on Alcoholics Anonymous

Alcoholics Anonymous: A structured rite of passage

 In the above discussion I have invoked the rite of passage metaphor and provided some ideas about how this can be taken up in assisting persons to revise their relationship with substances. Upon reviewing what I have written here, I found myself reflecting on what has become a particularly well established approach to addressing addictions and/or the excessive consumption of substances that is structured as a rite of passage - Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). Although the ideas that I have discussed in this paper are not directly informed by AA, and although many of the ideas and practices of narrative work directly contradict many of the ideas and practices of AA, I never-the-less have a strong respect for AA, one that now stretches back over two and a half decades. I will here share some of these reflections, doing so in the context of an acknowledgment that I cannot claim an insiders knowledge of this system.

 I believe that the originators of Alcoholics Anonymous had great vision, and a profound understanding of the significance of rites of passage. At the centre of A A is a ritual event that provides for a formalisation of the stages of separation and reincorporation, and for a marking of the turning points of person's lives. This is accompanied by the convening of forums that provide the opportunity for persons to give testimony to the decisions that they have made to break from excessive alcohol consumption, to the desires and purposes that motivate these decisions, and to tell and retell the stories of their lives before a group of witnesses, many of whom are veterans of such journeys. In this context, the responses of the witness group are powerfully acknowledging and authenticating of these decisions, desires, purposes and stories. As these decisions and stories, and these accounts of desire and purpose, become more richly described, they become more influential - they are more significantly shaping of persons' lives.

 There is also so much about AA that provides a great deal of sustenance to those who are navigating the liminal phase of this journey. There is a buddy system that provides the traveller with intimate support, and a concerned community of fellow travellers who share the maps, the knowledges, and the skills that are specific to journeys of this kind. The structure of AA builds in frequent opportunities for travellers to give voice to the trials and tribulations of these journeys, and for them to experience continuing acknowledgment of the different struggles that they find themselves engaged in.

 AA's responses to persons who turn back to the bottle are generally compassionate rather than judging. This is an antidote to the demoralising sense of personal failure that is so often occasioned by such U-turns, and keeps the door open on options for persons to try again, and yet again. In response to these U-turns, the AA community just goes on reaching out. This is a reaching out by persons who have 'been there', and who have a strong appreciation of the desperation that is experienced in this struggle.

 In terms of explanation for why it is that persons break from substance abuse, AA privileges notions of conscious purpose,  commitment, and calling. In privileging these notions, and in not joining with the contemporary habit of psychologising motives for action, AA assists persons to resist turning their lives over to the knowledges of  the professional disciplines - the understanding of what it is necessary to understand does not require a submission to the 'expert' knowledges. In evoking notions of conscious purpose, commitment and calling, AA emphasises ways of life that are guided by personal ethics, formulated and re-formulated time and time again through tellings and re-tellings in a concerned community.

 Alcoholics Anonymous, in the journey that it structures, in the understandings that it emphasises, and in its actual practices, has clearly had a positive impact on the lives of so many persons. - Via

Real Narratives Are Complicated

There's a TedX video making the rounds where Leslie Dodson takes on the "Ethics of Seeing." Dodson wonders in the video if the the narratives that researchers and/or reporters bring back are really accurate, and that most stories coming out of Africa for example, fall victim to "one noting."

Lately I've been thinking about my own training in a clinic where the emphasis was in feminist family therapy, and gender politics. We were influenced to look at our work through a particular lens, and in turn most of the research and/or reporting that came back to supervision would fit that lens. You know, we want to make our supervisors happy. Is it possible we fell victim to the same "one noting," or what Bruno Latour described as "instant sociology?" Did stories that stood outside of that lens become, as Dodson describes "inconvenient to our narratives?" Did we fall victim to a "monolithic narrative?" All stuff I'm chewing on.

** I write this as a white heterosexual male attempting to practice from a poststructuralist paradigm. Enjoy the Vid:

 

Drink Up

Via

I'm In A Book

How has the collapse of the economy affected your life? This is the compelling question photographer Gina Genis asked as she photographed 245 individual people. Their answers expose the helplessness and struggle to rise above the Great American Recession. Genis prints and places the portraits together to build an American flag 11' high by 18 1/2' long on the gallery wall. This project is a record of the Great American Recession as well as a tribute to human spirit. Economy Portraits was awarded Best Art Show of 2011 by the OC Weekly. To get your copy go to Gina's Website or Amazon.

Ruin

"life on paper is so much more
pleasurable:
there are no bombs or flies or
landlords or starving
cats"

Charles Bukowski - The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses over the Hill